Page 29 of The Harvey Girls
The newlyweds said not one word. They simply glanced at each other. The wife smiled shyly. The husband’s brows shifted upward. She tipped her head. He slipped his hand into hers.
“Well, um…,” the husband said to Will. “Maybe another time.”
“Of course,” Will replied with a nod. As the couple turned to go, he watched them for an extra moment, and Charlotte sensed a touch of sadness come over him.
She had grown so acutely aware of Simeon’s moods, gauging every twitch of even the tiniest facial muscle, and she found herself reading Will’s face in the same way. Sadness. Yes, that was it exactly.
“Well, now what are we supposed to do?” said Henny. “You can’t take us, can you? With no guests going? Just us Harvey Girls?”
Will thought for a moment, glanced away and then back at the women. “I’ll take you.”
“Would you get in trouble?” asked Billie. “We don’t want to cause any problems.”
“Well, strictly speaking, the trips are for guests,” he admitted. “But since they canceled last-minute, I’m not assigned anywhere else. As long as I fill the tank after, it should be fine.”
Kindness.
“I’ll pay for the gas,” said Charlotte.
His gaze flicked to her. That smile again. “That’s all right—”
“I want to.”
“We’ll all chip in!” said Henny.
“No, you girls have families to send your money home to,” said Charlotte. “I can afford it.” A few less dollars in her getaway fund wouldn’t hurt. Maybe she’d never even need it…
Will took note of this. “We’ll split it,” he said.
The road was like nothing Billie had ever experienced, and she’d been on plenty of bumpy roads in Nebraska.
“Get comfortable,” Will told them at the beginning of the trip. “It’s about fifty-five miles to Cameron, and the road is rustic, as I said, so it’ll be at least two and a half hours.”
Henny sat up front with him, peppering him with questions.
They headed east toward the rising sun, skirting the southern border of the park, and Will pointed out vegetation.
(“Pinyon pine, mostly, and sagebrush over there, and that’s some Indian ricegrass.
”) He talked about the history—until they came to some terrifyingly steep descents and he had to concentrate to keep the vehicle from skidding off the sandy, unpaved, one-lane road.
“This was a trail made by the Indians,” he told them. “They traveled along here, back when the Grand Canyon was theirs.”
“Theirs?” said Henny skeptically. “How’d they get it?”
“Well, they didn’t actually own it. They don’t really think about land like that.
They were here, and so was the land. Then back in the 1800s the military scouted it out, and they didn’t want it.
Eventually miners and frontiersmen came along and set up camps.
Then the Santa Fe Railway fixed the tracks up from Williams. Fred Harvey built the El Tovar in 1905, and suddenly everyone wants to stay in a nice room, eat decent food, and look at the canyon.
When they made it a national park in 1919, the Harvey Company made a deal to provide all the food and lodging at the rim.
They turned this trail into a road—such as it is. Hold on now, ladies.”
They were suddenly at a hairpin turn, and Will had to focus on keeping the wheels connected to the earth.
Billie sat directly behind him and saw what he saw: on their left was an unimaginably steep drop down to a river far below—and it was only a few feet away!
They might have gone right off the cliff if Will hadn’t had his wits about him. Billie gasped in fright.
Charlotte, sitting next to her on the passenger side, startled. “What? What is it?”
“We almost—”
“But we didn’t, did we?” Will interrupted. “The road gets a little close to the edge on our side, but it’s fine. We’re safe and sound.”
Despite the hair-raising twists and turns, the long car ride was a nice chance to get to know one another better.
Will, in his quiet, matter-of-fact way, asked them general questions—nothing terribly probing or personal—but this seemed to have the effect of allowing them to be more forthcoming than they might otherwise have been in casual conversation.
Henny, it turned out, was one of five daughters on a dairy farm in upstate New York, and when she saw the Harvey Girl job description, she’d jumped at the chance “not to smell cow manure every waking minute of the day. And a lot of sleeping minutes, too. I’d be having some sweet dream about one thing or another, and that stink would sneak right in! ”
As the middle daughter, she was neither a marrying-off priority nor a parenting priority.
“If I hadn’t packed my suitcase and hugged them all goodbye, they wouldn’t have noticed I’d left for weeks.
” But once she started sending money home, they all became quite aware that daughter number three was no longer milking Holsteins out in the barn.
“My next-younger sister, Astrid, can’t wait till she turns eighteen so she can join me. ”
Billie and Charlotte exchanged glances. “Won’t that be nice,” said Charlotte.
“How about you, Billie?” said Will. “Any brothers or sisters?”
Billie happily described her colorful family and found herself talking about her brief trip home.
“I never noticed… well, I mean, of course I knew we weren’t well off.
But after working for Fred Harvey for a month, making sure every last napkin was perfectly folded and every oyster fork gleamed…
I’d never even seen an oyster fork before.
I’d never seen an oyster, either. But now I have.
And once you know how napkins are supposed to be folded, well… ”
“It was the same for me,” said Henny. “I went home after six months in Rincon, New Mexico, and suddenly I was horrified at the grease stains on my mother’s apron.
I took it and scrubbed it real hard. She asked me why, and I said, ‘Well, it’s got spots.
’ And she said, ‘It’s an apron—that’s what it’s for! ’?”
“Fred Harvey’s turned us into a bunch of fussbudgets!” laughed Billie.
When it was Charlotte’s turn, she said she was from Boston and had one older brother, Oliver, who worked on ships like their father. In truth, Oliver rarely set foot on the deck of anything other than the Crowninshield yacht moored in Newport, Rhode Island, but “working on ships” was close enough.
“Do you miss them?” asked Will. This was the most personal question he’d asked since the trip began.
Charlotte had to think for a moment. It had been some time since she’d had the luxury of considering how she truly felt about anything other than evading Simeon’s fists.
She certainly missed Oliver. But her parents?
They’d been so utterly disgusted with her for wanting to spend even a moment with a lowly college professor.
After she eloped with Simeon, she had sent them a letter explaining the choice she’d made, begging for their forgiveness if not their blessing.
For weeks she’d gone to the post office hoping for a response, and eventually she realized she’d gotten one: silence.
Charlotte was certain of one thing—if Simeon had been the man she’d thought he was, she would have been happy.
She would have made peace with her disinheritance and lived a middle-class life, relieved to avoid all those dreadfully boring social engagements and fussing about who had outdone whom this season.
Of course she would have liked to be comfortable, with a housekeeper and maybe a maid or two.
But even without that, if she’d had a husband who loved and honored her…
Her parents were right in a sense. She’d made a terrible mistake; they were wrong only about the particulars. Did she miss them?
“Yes,” she said. “I do.”
“You’ll go back to Boston someday, then?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she said truthfully.
“Life has its twists and turns, doesn’t it?”
She gazed out over the vast arid wilderness. “Indeed it does.”
When Henny asked Will about himself, he was as brief and circumspect as Charlotte. He was an only child who grew up on a ranch near Ash Fork, Arizona. His parents had passed.
“What happened to the ranch?” asked Henny.
“I still own the land, but I sold off the livestock and rented the house to a nice family.”
“Not the life for you?” she asked.
“No,” he said. “Not anymore.”
Why not? was the question that hung in the air, but none of the women ventured to ask it. In his quiet way, Will had made clear that no answer would be forthcoming.